Editor’s Note: This exchange is part of a series of brief interviews with emerging writers of recent or forthcoming books. If you enjoyed it, please visit other interviews in the I’ve Got Questions feature.
- What’s the title of your book? Fiction? Nonfiction? Poetry? Who is the publisher and what’s the publication date?
THE AFTERLIFE PROJECT: a novel; Podium Publishing | June 3, 2025
- In a couple of sentences, what’s the book about?
With humanity facing imminent extinction, a team of scientists uses technology originally designed for interstellar travel to send a test subject ten millennia into Earth’s future. Marooned in an uninhabited wilderness, microbiologist Nicholas Hindman searches in vain for remnants of the human race. Meanwhile, back in 2068 A.D., the team’s head physicist and its doctor lead a small crew of survivors on a sailing voyage to a small volcanic island north of Sicily on a harrowing quest to save the future.
- What’s the book’s genre (for fiction and nonfiction) or primary style (for poetry)?
The Afterlife Project, a finalist for the 2023 Prism Prize for Climate Literature, is a work of literary speculative fiction. That said, it also fits in the genres of science fiction and eco-fiction.
- What’s the nicest thing anyone has said about the book so far?
“A fascinating tale that is difficult to put down; dire ecological challenges and imaginative future discovery combine in this very engrossing read.“— Library Journal, starred review
- What book or books is yours comparable to or a cross between? [Is your book like Moby Dick or maybe it’s more like Frankenstein meets Peter Pan?]
Station Eleven meets The Overstory, or maybe The Road meets Cloud Atlas.
- Why this book? Why now?
Fiction, more than any other art form, enables a reader to experience the world from within a consciousness that’s not their own. Imagining alternative lives and alternative futures—sometimes very dark ones—from the relative safety and comfort of the bedside or a favorite reading chair, putting ourselves in the position of fictional characters as they confront tense and difficult challenges, and then processing those experiences and the emotions they evoke into wisdom or at least working theories about life, is a cathartic, healthy, and uniquely human practice.
I suppose part of what I was trying to do in the book was to create an immersive adventure story about a future where the survival of the entire species is in doubt, in order to explore how that might feel emotionally.
My hope is that the novel offers both a cautionary note about the multi-pronged environmental crisis we’re currently facing—a reminder that humanity needs to take action now in order to avoid the worst outcomes— and a kind of optimistic prediction about nature’s capacity for healing, at least in the deep future time-frame.
- Other than writing this book, what’s the best job you’ve ever had?
Probably as a “featured expert” (traveling lecturer) for National Geographic Expeditions. I got to travel to some pretty cool places and do some pretty cool things. In fact it was in this role, on a small-ship cruise through Tierra del Fuego— Ushuaia, Argentina, Cape Horn, Beagle Channel, Straits of Magellan to Puntarenas, Chile, with zodiac landings at glaciers, sub-Antarctic forests, penguin colonies—that I received the initial inspiration for The Afterlife Project.
- What do you want readers to take away from the book?
If there’s one piece of wisdom I would wish for readers to take away from reading it, it’s that we’re not facing the end of the amazing, ever-evolving panoply of life on Earth. Far from it. Rather we are—or should be—facing the end of the illusion that the human species is not part of nature. That we haven’t from our very emergence as a species been embedded in the ebb and flow of this complex and beautiful 4.5 billion year-old planet. This would be a timely and necessary paradigm shift. Because it’s still not too late to save ourselves.
- What food and/or music do you associate with the book?
Food: Foraged foods like fish, venison, wild onions, ramps, nuts and berries, various invertebrates, mushroom elixirs, and “lab jerky” (a soy-based post-apocalyptic staple for my questing scientists)
Music: Gregorian chants, Bach, the Grateful Dead, and all the other musical treasures that were permanently lost with the collapse of the human species.
- What book(s) are you reading currently?
Burn, Peter Heller. I treasure his novels and have been so honored that he’s among the authors that blurbed The Afterlife Project
Learn more about Tim on his website.
Follow him at BlueSky and Threads.
Buy the book from the publisher (Podium Publishing) or Bookshop.org.
